Gordon Ambrosino will present his talk The Bears Ears Project: Consultation, Collaborative Exhibition Curation, and Community Outreach virtually on Friday, January 28 at 2 pm as part of the 2022 Spring Anthropology Colloquia Speaker Series.  You can access the talk here.  You can obtain the passcode by emailing Dr. Ian Wallace at iwallace@unm.edu

Gordon Ambrosino’s research centers on the agency of art in constructing place-based histories at specific times, and across time. Informed by his prior and current repatriation consultations with Native cultural leaders through NAGPRA, his work more specifically focuses upon re-establishing the inextricable connections between museum collections, past and present people, and the land to illustrate the manifold ways in which art links identities to specific places. His 2020 book Rock Art, Water, and Ancestors: The Semiotic Construction of a Sacred Landscape in the Central Andes (1800 BCE – CE 1820) is about the role that a large complex of rock art in highland contexts played in solidifying ancestral relations to venerated rock features and water sources across several cultural periods and horizons. Informed by this research, Gordon has been developing a co-curated museum exhibition with cultural leaders from the tribes of the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition, which will demonstrate the complexity of the Bears Ears National Monument as a culturally plural landscape. Funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, consultations for Bears Ears: Living Land  began in early 2018 and this exhibition is scheduled to open at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in 2023. 

Hosted by the UNM Department of Anthropology, the  Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies, and the Latin American and Iberian Institute (LAII)  the Department Colloquia Speaker Series will continue this semester.  Talks from this years series are available on our You Tube for your viewing.

 Upcoming speakers include:

February 4   Thomas Kraft (University of Utah)

February 18   Lindsay Montgomery (University of Arizona)

February 25    Stephanie Fox (UNM)

March 4         David Stuart (UNM)

March 25       Kristina Lyons (University of Pennsylvania)

April 1           Shaylih Muehlmann (University of British Columbia)

April 15          Webb Keane (University of Michigan)

April 22         Jana Valesca Meyer (UNM)

May 6           Barbara Meek (University of Michigan)